In 2012, Caitlan Coleman, a native of Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, and her Canadian husband, Josh Boyle, were in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province as part of an adventure trip through Russia and Central Asia. Coleman was several months pregnant at the time. The couple was captured by the militant Haqqani network and was seen over the years in two videos, along with two of the children they had in captivity, in which they pleaded for their freedom. A third child was born recently.

On Thursday the Pakistani military said it had rescued “5 Western hostages including 1 Canadian, his US National wife and their three children from terrorist custody through an intelligence based operation by Pakistan troops and intelligence agencies.” The statement said the family had been kept in Afghanistan since their abduction but had crossed over into Pakistan in recent days and that Pakistani authorities were alerted to this fact by the U.S. counterparts.

President Trump, in a statement, confirmed that those rescued were Coleman, now 31, Boyle, now 34, and their three children, all of whom were born in captivity.

The couple’s path to Wardak, from there to captivity, and from there to their eventual freedom, was a complicated one. Canadian media have previously said Boyle was fascinated with terrorism. In 2009 he told the Globe and Mail: “Anything related to terrorism on Wikipedia, I wrote, pretty much.” Boyle was also married at one point to the sister of Omar Khadr, the teenage Canadian who was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and held in Guantanamo Bay until 2012. (At first Khadr pleaded guilty to killing an American soldier, but later said his confession was coerced. The U.S. returned him to Canada to serve out the rest of his eight-year sentence, but he was freed by a Canadian court. He eventually sued the Canadian government, won a multimillion settlement, and an apology.) Intelligence officials have previously called that link and Boyle’s abduction a “horrible coincidence.” Boyle and Coleman met online. They were married in 2011, a year before they set off on their trip.

The circumstances of their rescue are still not clear. The Pakistani military said the family were freed following an “operation by Pakistani forces, based on actionable intelligence from US authorities.” Both the White House and the U.S. State Department said the U.S., working with Pakistan, has “secured the release of the Boyle-Coleman family from captivity in Pakistan.”

The distinction is important, because it’s the difference between a military operation to free the five hostages and a negotiation for their release. Past successful efforts at negotiating hostage releases with the Taliban or its allies with it have involved Qatar, the Arab nation that is known for a pragmatic foreign policy that, among other things, involves maintaining ties to actors like the Taliban and then serving as intermediaries for indirect negotiations. It’s partly this posture of seeming openness to militant groups that has thrust Qatar into a diplomatic standoff with its Arab neighbors—one that the U.S. has tried unsuccessfully to mediate. So it’s still an open question whether and how any negotiations with Coleman and Boyle’s captors took place, and with whom. Jennifer Griffin, the Fox News national-security correspondent, quoted a U.S. official as saying, in her words: “there was NO military operation to release Caitlan Coleman and her family. This was a negotiated handover.”

“We will never know” how they were freed, Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington who is now a leading critic of his country’s government and its military, told me. He cited past cases of freed hostages whose recovery was later discovered to have been the result of negotiations between the Pakistani military and militants. (Haqqani is of no relation to the network that kidnapped Coleman and her family.)

Haqqani, who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, added that the hostage release “raises questions about the competence of Pakistani intelligence” in finding people within its borders or in the tribal areas near it.

“This is an intelligence service who behaves like the KGB or the Stasi with its own citizens who dissent, and is able to harass them and find there everywhere and anywhere, but is totally unable to find bin Laden when he is located in Pakistan or to find the home where a family is being kept hostage for five years,” he said.

Although the couple was abducted in Afghanistan, others have raised the possibility they were in Pakistan. The Haqqani network operates in the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it may well be the case that Coleman and Boyle were moved back and forth to secure locations in the two countries. At a hearing before a U.S. Senate panel in 2015, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine, a U.S. special-forces soldier, said the couple and the one child they had at the time “are … hostages in Pakistan.” Other former hostages of the Haqqani network, including the American soldier Bowe Bergdahl and the journalist David Rohde, were also moved from Afghanistan into the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Pakistan has been viewed as a reluctant partner in the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Most famously Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in Abbotabad, the Pakistani military town, where he had lived for several years after the attacks of September 11. Pakistan is also believed to support groups like the Taliban that are working to destabilize the U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul.

At the same time, however, Pakistan itself has become a victim of terrorism. Militant groups have staged frequent attacks over the years against politicians, minorities, and others. And the Pakistani military has cracked down on militant groups operating inside the country. Add to this the Trump administration’s policy in the region, which has emphasized pressuring Pakistan to crack down on terrorism. The Defense Department has withheld millions in military funding from the country because of its perceived lack of action against the Haqqani network in particular. Trump, in his statement about the hostage release, said that it was “a positive moment for our country’s relationship with Pakistan. The Pakistani government’s cooperation is a sign that it is honoring America's wishes for it to do more to provide security in the region.”

But Haqqani was dismissive of the idea. “This is really typical of Pakistani intelligence services behavior,” he said. “Whenever the heat gets too much, they deliver something to raise American hopes. ... It has happened enough times in the last 20 years for people to be cynical.”

He added: “If Pakistan is to regain its credibility, it will have to act in a consistent manner against all jihadis and make sure that that consistency is sufficiently visible for cynicism about Pakistani behavior to end.”

Indeed, Trump, in his statement, urged Pakistan’s “cooperation and teamwork in helping secure the release of remaining hostages.” At least one other American is believed to be in the Taliban’s custody: Kevin King, a 60-year-old who was working at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul when he was abducted in 2016 along with Timothy Weeks, a 48-year-old Australian colleague. Another American, Paul Overby, has been missing in the country since 2014.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”